Somehow, Italy seems like more fun.

I've been home for about a week and a half now and things are getting back to normal.  I still have no sense of time, which is evidenced in my having missed putting out the garbage on garbage day twice now.  I've also been going to bed insanely early, and waking up about 4:00am, so for the last couple of days I've been relying on the caffeine in diet coke to keep me up past 9:00.

Alberta has been hit with a doozy of a snow storm. I've spent the week absolutely freezing, which I thought was psychosomatic because of the cold outside.  Last night, I remembered that I'd changed the batteries in the programable thermostat at 5:00am on Monday (when it's usually pretty cool in here).  I remembered being surprised that the temperature immediately showed as being 21C but I wasn't alert enough to think more of it.  So, after being freezing for a week, I finally caught on and reset the thermostat.  Right away, it showed that it was 17.5C  in here, not 21C as it'd said earlier and started warming up. It's good to know that I'm not losing my mind.

Back to the snow storm, I was supposed to go to Edmonton today but can't because of the snow.  Edmonton got 31cm in a day, and they're still digging out.  Around here, I think we got that much, but it was spread out over three days so that I had to shovel eight times... which is maybe a good thing because I can't jog in this weather and need to get my exercise somehow.   I'm also going to Zumba this afternoon - this time with shoes - and am not yet convinced that it won't kill me.  I'm pretty sure that my jeans feel tighter now than they did while I was on vacation.  Whodda thunk that I'd manage to spend three weeks in the land of pizza and pasta - lose weight while there - and then come home and pack on the pounds?

In other news, which isn't very good, I just came back from a vet appointment with Cotton.  He's been coughing a lot and losing weight.  He's had a heart murmur for a while now, but it looks like it's progressed to the beginnings of heart failure.  The vet hopes that, having caught it early, we can turn things around with the right medication.  I really hope she's right.

I promised Ginny that I'd keep a daily diary of our trip to Italy.  She did one too, and wants to combine them together.  I did well for a while, and then stopped writing sometime around Sorrento.  I really need to finish that up, and finish going through and cleaning up all the pictures I took.  Don't be surprised if I post after the fact entires about some of the places we visited.